


Blue

by CelestialTapir



Category: Wayfarers Series - Becky Chambers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-28 01:32:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10061885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestialTapir/pseuds/CelestialTapir
Summary: Blue discovers himself





	

He remembers colouring. Hating the lines, the way the colours had to all be confined. Wanting to do it more. To make his own lines, his own pictures. To release the world in his head. When the maid asked him what his favourite colour was, he told her. It was always the same. He couldn't think of a nicer colour in the universe than blue.

He remembers his house mom's firm voice as she took away the pencils. “You're too old for that sort of thing, Laurian,” she said.

Their maid looked sad, but said nothing.

When his house mom caught him a week later, poking through her cupboards to find the pencils, she had that look in her face again. That same look as when she read his homework over and found the squiggled characters there. The filled-in numbers, the lines drawn between each full stop. She sat him on the formal sofa. She put a hand on his shoulder and peered directly into his face. It was the first time he thought his house mom had ever met his eyes. He didn't like it, but he couldn't turn away.

“Laurian,” she said. “They're not for you. None of that is for you. I just don't know what else we can do to make you understand. It breaks my heart that you just can't see it. Laurian, really, it does. We're at our wits' ends with you. What with the speech as well—what are we even paying that therapist for—I'm beginning to wonder if there might be something wrong with you. Something genetically wrong with you.”

He remembers the chill that gripped him, shuddered down him and clung to his ankles for a while before it finally vanished. At school, the other children called him a genefreak, too. His teachers wrote notes and shook their heads. He couldn't talk properly, he became lost in thought during his lessons. Oh yes, he'd heard them whispering before, the teachers and his parents. A slip-up. It happened to the best reproductive pairs, in the best laboratories.

His at-work mom barely spoke to him at all. At night sometimes, he heard his moms arguing. His at-work mom had her career to think of. It couldn't get out that she had a genefreak in her own family. Her _own_ family, Jacintha.

Laurian waited until both of them were asleep. He crept from his bed and tiptoed to his moms' room. He was convinced that the sound of his own heartbeat would wake them, but he needed to know. He found their wardrobe ajar, and slipped into it. Opened each shoebox gently, silently, to see if his pencils were inside.

That was his last night at home.

***

It's their fourth or fifth day in Port Coriol. Jane—no, Pepper, squeezes his arm, trying to tug him away to another food vendor.

“I had these things yesterday, they're called noodles,” she says. “You have to try them!”

But Laurian is lured by a different sight. A different smell than food. Unfamiliar, almost unpleasant, hinting at the grease and oil of the factory. The metallic twinge of scrap. Yet inviting too. A shop off the main drag, with a hand-painted sign in illegible Klip.

“What is it?” Pepper asks. He gestures. “Art, metal-working and carpentry supplies,” she reads. “Huh. You want to go check it out?”

He is already walking toward it. The smell becomes stronger as he nears it. It is joined by the soft pungeance of woodchips, the sharpness of metal shards. And a fabricy smell he can't identify, but it puts him in mind of blankets, of towels.

The shop is small and cramped, metal shelves stacked with paper and brushes, tools of all kinds for wood and metalwork, stacks of thick, stiff cloth. And a whole shelf-full of pencils. He is speechless, and not for the ordinary reason. He runs his hands over the pencils, gasping at their gentle hardness. He wants them. He wants all of them.

“Oh hey!” A broad-shouldered human man, bald but in a different way to Pepper, grinning broadly, steps into the shop. Those are the only words he speaks that Laurian understands. The rest is a burble that Pepper nods along to, before she says, “You come in here for anything in particular? Do you like this kind of stuff?”

“Y-yes,” Laurian says. “B-b-but it's a l-l-long t-t-time since ...” He shrugs, head down.

“Well, I think if you like those things, you should get some.”

He tries to smile. Pepper doesn't quite understand money yet, and he doesn't know how much pencils are meant to cost. He removes his hand from the pile of pencils, realising he has been stroking them without thinking, and looks around the rest of the shop.

“They're not for you, Laurian,” his house mom's voice said.

In the corner, peaking out from behind a shelf of small, dark bottles and ornate pen-nibs, there is a stand with a board on it. It is a picture, incomplete but beautiful, full of squares of paint. Reds and browns at the top, and a gradient moving through oranges and yellows, through greens. The bottom bar is serene. A body of water, a piece of evening sky, he isn't sure, but his breath is caught in peering at it. He moves closer to it, wondering at its richness, wondering at the variety. He almost wants to touch it, even knowing one cannot touch a colour.

The shopkeeper makes a comment.

“He says that's his testing board,” Pepper said. “He sounded pretty amused. He says he just tests out different colours there, so he can show people what they look like outside of the tube. It's paint. I never knew paint could make something so pretty.”

He'd had five pencils. Black, red, green, yellow, and the final one, the shortest one, which he sharpened again and again. But even that pencil had just been one aspect. One view of this spectrum. He has never seen such a lovely colour in his life. It is calming and it is warming. It embraces him. “Blue,” he whispers.


End file.
